Robbers Allegedly Used Onions to Torture, Teary-Eyed Victims Insist

A Queens-based robbery syndicate is accused of torturing their victims by stuffing their heads into bags filled with smelly onions. The Daily News reports that Erick Mejia and his crew were allegedly responsible for a number of stick-ups of drug traffickers up and down the East Coast. They would fill a bag with cut-up onions and put it over a victim's head, police reports reveal, to coax them into spilling the beans on the location of their stash. This is just the kind of sustainable, locally grown, environmentally responsible torture that the organic food movement hath wrought.

In the two alleged heists in which Mejia's posse used onions, they stole a total of $135,000 and 77 pounds of cocaine. Assuming they paid street value for those onions, that is roughly a $134,997 profit.

It was almost the perfect crime, as the evidence could have easily been turned into rings, soup, or, the most sinister of all, chili.

The Daily News reports that the crew was also known to torture their victims "with more traditional methods like beatings, burning with a hot iron, submerging a victim's head in water, and squeezing their testicles with pliers." One second with a bag full of those stinky onions, however, and they were probably begging for the testicle pliers.